Abstract

Family Involvement Programmes on the Metabolic Response of Diabetic Patients

Diabetes is one incurable chronic disease, yet may be controlled through the compliance of diabetic management. This condition may distress the patients. Various efforts have already been made to improve the diabetic patients’ compliance through self-care management and diabetic self-management. However, those efforts do not involve family. Thus, efforts involving families in the management of diabetic patients are greatly necessary. The efforts may be conducted by creating a model of family empowerment. The research is conducted with a quasi-experiment pre post-test with control group design on each of 15 respondents. In both intervention and control group are given education on diabetic diet, physical activities for the diabetic patients, drugs and stress management. In the intervention group, the education is then structurally continued involving families every week for a month. In the next three months, the blood glucose and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) level are measured. The data are analyzed using paired and independent t-test. The research results show that the majority of respondents in both groups are at the middle of adult age with the gender of female (60.0%) in the intervention group and (53.3%) in the control group, senior high school education level (46.7%)in the intervention group and (33.3%) in the control group, occupation as housewives (40.0%) in the intervention group and (33.3%) in the control group, length of treatment duration in both groups is at the average of 3 years. This research proves that family involvement on diabetes management may lower the blood glucose level (p=0.000) and HbA1c level (p=0.000) of those diabetic patients.